don't stand so close to me
by KyraAnnCoombes
Summary: "There's nothing silly about romance, Sansa. Tens of hundreds of years of literature and look at all the love stories we've told." Willas teaches English, and Sansa creeps into his heart over the course of a school year.


She was close enough for him to smell the subtle, floral mint of her hair. He was boiling inside, stomach full of sin and shame, and as her rose-petal lips opened inquisitively…

* * *

Willas's bad leg spasmed and his eyes shot open. The pain washed like a hot, sick wave from his knee up to his hip and down to his foot as he pulled himself into a seated position and willed his reprehensible erection into submission. (The heat rising to his stubbled cheeks did more to help than his listing of the characters in the Canterbury Tales, but he wouldn't ever admit it.) He reached for his cane and struggled to his feet. As he hobbled painfully into the kitchen for tea and muscle salve, he wondered how exactly Sansa Stark had managed to drive him so delightfully mad.

* * *

It began in November, or perhaps before that. She distinguished herself as one of his favorite students by hardly distinguishing herself at all. Her work was neat and on time, and in October her midterm essay on motherhood in Frankenstein was the most memorable of the 28 he'd graded, even if it hadn't earned the highest mark. She was shy in class, but on the few occasions she did speak she was passionate (if quiet) and her observations were trenchant, so he wrote as much at the bottom of her first quarter report card.

But in November, things shifted. Assignments were missed, and she seemed distracted in class. "Sansa, a word, please!" he called out one morning as the class filed out.

She jumped half out of her skin when he said her name, but hung back, looking nervously as the door.

"I'll write you a note to your next class, if that's what you're worried about. Sit, please."

Sansa obliged without a word, choosing a seat near the front of the room.

"What class do you have after this?" Willas asked, filling out the top of a hall pass.

"History, with Professor Lan—"

"Lannister," he finished for her. "Tyrion's alright, I'm sure he won't mind your tardiness. Would you like to talk about what's going on?"

Her cheeks blossomed like his parent's prized roses at his words. "How… How do you mean, Professor?" she stammered, looking down at the waxed linoleum floor.

"You've missed three assignments in as many weeks, and your essay on The Great Gatsby was pitifully puerile compared to your midterm." He paused, his cane rhythmically punctuating the silence as he walked towards her. "Now it could just be senioritis, as it's called," he admitted, leaning against an adjacent desk, "but—and correct me if I'm wrong, Miss Stark—you don't seem the type."

"I…" she began uncertainly, apparently hoping the proper response was written on the floor in front of her, "I…"

He held up his hands. "I don't want an excuse, Sansa," he said kindly. "I just want you to know that I see something's going on, and that my door is always open if you'd like to talk or spend your free time here," he offered.

She adjusted her purple scarf, but didn't speak.

"Here," he held out the hall pass. When she stood and tried to take it, she finally met his eyes. "But Sansa, if you miss any more big assignments, I'm calling home. Is that understood?"

She nodded again, and he relinquished the hall pass.

* * *

He didn't expect her to take up his offer. After their conversation, her work quality rebounded almost completely, and aside from a poorly scheduled dentist's appointment she hadn't missed a single class or assignment. But two days after the holiday break, she knocked and poked her head into the classroom door.

"Professor Tyrell?" she asked nervously, only head, neck, and a sliver of shoulder visible, "May I eat my lunch in here?"

"Sansa!" he said, looking up from the thick stack of papers he'd been grading. "Absolutely, come in."

She slipped into the room and sat at her regular desk. Out of her backpack she took a large water bottle and a pink tupperware, and set both gently on the desk. "Oh!" she exclaimed, looking up at him, "You're not usually in a wheelchair, are you alright?"

Willas chuckled. "Sansa, do you know my youngest brother?" Her cheeks went pink in response, (a result of Loras's rather famous looks, he was certain), and she nodded. "Then you know he's quite the football player, yes? Turns out it runs in the family. Or did, anyways. My father played in college, my brother Garlan did, and I almost did."

"Almost?" she repeated, resting her head on her hands.

"I made it as far as being recruited. I was nowhere near as good as Loras, of course, but good enough to get recruited to Hightower University. So it's the first week of training camp and you know how boys your age are—testosterone in abundance, but very little sense—so after practice, a couple of us decided to have a little scrimmage to see who was the most idiotic. Oberyn Martell—"

"The Red Viper?" Sansa interrupted.

He laughed again. "Yes, I think that's what he likes to be called. Anyways, we'd had a bit of a competition from the start, and he slide tackled me on wet grass. I tried to twist away, ended up rupturing my ACL."

She gasped.

"And, of course, being 19, I was depressed about not getting to play and rubbish about taking my physical therapy seriously. I developed arthrofibrosis, scarring on the joint, and at this point I'll be lucky to recover 50% mobility. Cold weather makes the pain much worse, and some days I can't conscionably rely on my cane."

"My brother Bran is in a wheelchair," she said quietly. "He fell, rock-climbing this summer. We don't know if he'll walk again."

"It's not an easy way to live," he said soberly, returning to his work.

They were silent for a few minutes as Sansa ate her sandwich (Willas wondered if she cut the crusts off herself) and he graded quizzes. He spoke again when she took out a book. "You'd think tenth graders would no longer need vocabulary quizzes, but here I am," he sighed. "What are you reading?"

Sansa blushed again, which he was beginning to notice was a habit of hers. "Oh! Nothing really, it's a bit embarrassing…"

"What's embarrassing is this sixteen year-old who doesn't know what 'abhorrent' means, despite it being a perfect definition for his grade on this quiz. But there's no shame in reading." She giggled at that, and it made him smile.

"Just rereading Emma," she explained shyly. "Jane Austen's been my favorite for years, and I know it's just silly romance—"

"Nonsense! There's nothing silly about romance, Sansa. Tens of hundreds of years of literature and look at all the love stories we've told."

The bell rang its high-low tone and she was gone.

* * *

Sansa didn't return the next day, or the day after that. But the next day after that she did, and she revealed that dragonflies were her favorite animal, even though most people didn't count them as animals at all. After the weekend, she came in before the day had even started with tears lining her blue eyes and said her dog Lady had died unexpectedly, and Willas adjusted the next day's lesson plan to accommodate a reflective essay about beauty and peace in death.

Slowly and peaceably, like ivy growing up an old brick wall, they fell into a routine. Sometimes she brought him lunch, leftovers that he'd reheat in the teacher's lounge (no students allowed). She began to help him grade the tenth grader's quizzes and homework, and she was very helpful in suggesting love poems for the special Valentine's Day lesson.

Some days she seemed to wear much more makeup than others, but he had written that off as a teen girl's fancy. Or he thought he had, at least.

A week after Valentine's Day, the English Department heater kicked into overdrive and the building was uncomfortably warm all day. "It's a bit warm in here for a scarf, Sansa," he said at lunch, watching her alphabetize graded quizzes for his third period class. Willas had abandoned his customary tweed jacket moments into the morning and had gone as far as to roll his sleeves up to his elbows.

"I'm fine, thanks," she said quietly. "If I take the scarf off, I'm afraid I'll lose it," she explained unconvincingly.

A moment later, she stretched to tie her hair up. Her long neck stretched as she lifted her head back, and peeking up out of the top of her scarf he saw what looked like a very large, dark bruise.

"Hells! Sansa, what happened to your neck?" he asked, much more emotionally than he'd intended.

She froze. "It..it was my brother's dog," she said hurriedly, gathering her things. "I have to go, I forgot I had to do something!" Sansa practically ran from the room, and the door shut very loudly behind her.

Willas didn't know what to do. He could report it, but to do so without telling her first would betray her trust. And he wasn't sure what he'd seen: it'd looked like a bruise, but it could also have been a hickey, which would also explain her embarrassment. He chose to ignore why the thought of Sansa with a hickey made him so uncomfortable.

Except for her detached presence in class, she avoided him for two and a half days. When she finally returned, whatever had happened to her neck had faded enough to hide under makeup. He walked a stack of papers to be sorted over to her seat. "Sansa," he began quietly, "it wasn't your brother's dog, was it?"

She blushed and looked at the floor, but shook her head.

"Can you tell me what it was?"

Another shake.

"Should I report it?"

Another.

"Do you want to talk about it?"

Another.

"Okay." He set the papers in front of her.

"Thank you," she said quietly, her small voice strained.

He wasn't sure what she was thanking him for. He'd felt better when he thought it was a hickey.

* * *

Sansa opened up again over the course of the next month, and though there were a few dark days here and there, she became herself again.

Right before Spring Break, Professor Lannister's nephew Joffrey made himself the talk of the teacher's lounge by managing to get himself suspended despite his family's considerable influence. Willas had heard students volleying increasingly unbelievable theories about whatever the boy had done. At lunch, he asked Sansa, who was sitting next to him and quietly eating a salad.

She blushed darker than normally. "In Professor Lannister's class today, he destroyed some old primary sources in the library. Irreplaceable stuff. One of the things was a hundred years old."

Willas whistled slowly. "I would guess that this is why they tend to limit those things to university libraries," he said darkly.

"He's so mean," she said fiercely, the tip of her nose pink and tears filling her eyes. "He think he owns everything and everyone and he's somean." Sansa sniffled. "We've been dating for five months," she confessed. "But he's been cheating on me, the whole time I think. And he's so…" her breath caught in her throat. "Oh my goodness, I'm so sorry. I don't know why I'm telling you all this," she apologized, picking a strawberry slice off the top of her salad.

Unthinking, Willas put his right hand over Sansa's small left hand. "It's alright. You can tell me things, Sansa. I like talking to you."

Her mouth made a small 'o.' "W…why?"

He chuckled. "You're very intelligent, and a very nice person to be around. I'm a bit young compared to most of the teachers here, and it's nice to have someone to look forward to seeing every day." The words felt strangely…private. More than he'd intended them to be. He coughed. "What have you been reading lately?"

* * *

In retrospect, he should have realized he had a problem much sooner. Around the time that Joffrey Baratheon returned from his week of suspension and Willas felt himself get angry when he saw him, or when he found himself thinking about 'Sansa Stark, person' and not 'Sansa Stark, student,' or for that matter when he started thinking of her at home and in his parent's garden and at his sister's apartment…especially his sister's apartment.

Margaery was in her first year of university and doing well by all accounts. Eternally popular, beautiful, and more provided for by their parents than either Willas or his brothers had been, Margaery had it all. But she wanted more, and what she wanted, she took. Days after Joffrey's return, he visited her for dinner.

"Does the Baratheon boy go to your school?" Margaery asked over a glass of wine she was too young to drink.

Willas's shoulders tensed. "Unfortunately. He's known as a bit of a terror."

She giggled. "He's a bit of a terror at parties, too. He was here all last week; I think he slept with at least two of our cousins."

His blood boiled at that. "Be quiet, Margaery."

This time she outright laughed. "Why so sensitive, brother?"

"He's dating one of my students," Willas explained (why had his first thought been "my friend?"). "Sweet girl, she deserves better."

"She deserves to make her own mistakes, Willas," Margaery said, draining her glass.

"He's more than a mistake, Margaery," he argued. "I think he might be hurting her."

Margaery crossed her arms. "You have a way to report that."

"To what end, Marg? He's a Lannister, I'm more likely to lose my job than save her from him."

"What is he, a dragon?" Margaery laughed. "All this talking of 'saving?' You're reading too many stories, Willas."

"It's my job to read stories, Margaery." He pushed up on the table and stood, picking his cane up from where it hung on the back of his chair. "I have to go. So I can do my job tomorrow." Willas kissed the top of his little sister's head, thinking about what she's said.

* * *

The start of spring was cold and wet, and Willas needed his wheelchair much more than he usually did at this time of year. The day he was thankful for it was the day he realized he had a problem.

Sansa got up to sharpen her pencil at the front of his desk. Her red hair was down and fell over her shoulder when she bent over (his desk was low to accommodate his wheelchair), and he could see down her dark green shirt down to the hints of a pink lace bra. As if that wasn't enough to cause uncomfortable tightness in his trousers, when she spun to return to her seat (with her damnable fiery hair fanning out behind her) she dropped her pencil. That made her bend at the waist, directly in front of him.

The blanket on his legs hid what otherwise would have been an embarrassingly apparent erection, and he hid his own desperate sputtering with a heavy forced cough.

When class dismissed he told her he ha a very important meeting at lunch and she'd have to eat somewhere else.

That very important meeting was half him staring at his turned-off computer and half him killing his leg by pacing uselessly, desperate to feel less disgusting. At first he tried to rationalize, to say that it was errant and a result of extremely infrequent sexual activity. But as soon as he thought that, he knew it was untrue. It was Sansa, plain and painfully simple. He tried again. Perhaps the amount of time they'd been spending together had had some subconscious effect…but then he remembered his conversation with Margaery. Willas exhaled loudly, removing and cleaning his glasses out of habit rather than need.

It happened again later that week, when her rose petal lips pouted at another student's interpretation of Ophelia, and again when she leaned over him to look up a poem on his computer and her unbound hair fell into his lap and his stomach dropped and his whole existence was the sweet, floral mint scent that was so beautifully Sansa.

He wanted—and probably needed—to distance himself from her, to put enough distance between them to keep himself sane. But every time he saw her the walls he'd struggled to build crumbled just to hear her laugh or see her blush.

* * *

After classes one day in late March Willas was walking towards the teacher's planning office to clear out his mailbox. The click of his cane against cheap, mass-produced tile echoed loudly in the empty halls. He always waited until the students were gone in the afternoon to go to the front office (he liked to get there before they arrived, too), not because he couldn't stand their stares and mutterings but because it was so much easier to get around without having to wade through patches of the various social strata and aimless wandering. There was much more focus in an empty hall.

Or in this case, a mostly empty hall. He could hear a boy—an upperclassman, by the sound—talking loudly, and when he turned the corner, he saw him..and her.

Sansa was sitting on a bench in the courtyard and Joffrey was standing above her, his back towards Willas. Sansa seemed upset, which was enough to have Willas moving quickly towards the pair. Neither noticed him until he was upon them, at which point Joffrey sneered, "Yes, Professor?"

Willas leaned against the bench Sansa was sitting on and rested his hand on her shoulder to steady himself. He lifted his cane off the ground and pressed the rubber stopper at the end into Joffrey's chest. "I'll need you to leave my student alone, Mr. Baratheon," he said cooly, his need to protect Sansa overpowering the wild feeling in his stomach that came from touching her.

"It's after hours," Joffrey protested, "you can't—"

"I can," Willas said. "Step away from her or my bad leg be damned I will carry you to the headmistress's office over my shoulder like a sack of grain."

Joffrey squinted like he was about to protest, then looked down at Sansa. Before he could speak, Willas tapped the butt of his cane against his chest again.

The boy skulked away, and Willas waited until he was out of earshot to speak. "I hope you'll forgive my using you as a support, but the conversation simply wouldn't have been as dramatic if I hadn't." Sansa giggled. "Are you usually at school this late in the afternoon?"

She shook her head. "Arya's just started rowing—well, coxswaining for the boy's varsity boat—and I have to wait two hours to drive her home. Joffrey knew it'd be a good time to bully me over trying to break up with him."

Willas flexed his back muscles, using the quiet pop to silence the thoughts bubbling up in his mind. "In that case, you're welcome to stay in my classroom until I go home. I believe I have some tea, if you'll accept microwaved water."

Sansa smiled. "Aren't you tired of me? I'm around often enough." She slipped her bag over her shoulder as she stood, eyes downcast.

The tile ahead of him may as well have been a lava pit for as carefully as he chose his steps and words. "On the contrary, Sansa. As I've told you, you're a rather nice person to be around, and–" the words slipped out before he really thought about them, "–you're probably my favorite person that I see on a daily basis."

She blushed. "Oh."

He could get his mail later, anyways.

* * *

He'd never much cared for sports besides football, but Willas found himself rather guiltily appreciative of the school's crew team. At lunch one Tuesday he found out Sansa had never seen Dead Poets Society, so that Wednesday and Thursday afternoon they watched it on his outdated school computer. She cried so hard at the end that he couldn't help but hug her for a delirious moment. His whole world was the smell of her hair and the weight of his head on her shoulder until he realized what he was doing and delicately extricated himself.

"I have to go," he said, hoping it wasn't abrupt, "I forgot I promised my mother tea today." It was a lie, but the deceit hurt less than the look of confusion on Sansa's face, like she'd enjoyed their brief contact as much as he had, like she was looking to him for an answer… "Sorry, I hate to push you out, but..."

"It's…okay," Sansa sounded shaky, but offered a small, delicate smile. She slipped out of the classroom like smoke and left him extinguished.

* * *

Sansa's class had a final project: to choose a book of their own and write a report on it. It was due at the end of term and would replace their final exam for the class. To attempt to avert the crisis of procrastination so common in the age group, their choice of book had to be approved by the end of second week of April.

She turned hers in two days early and after a quiz. The full sheet of lined paper had her name and the date on the top, the rest of the vast white expanse marked by her small, neat handwriting only three times. Villete, Charlotte Brontë. The color drained from Willas's face, and he allowed himself to look up at her. She smiled like she hadn't just thrown his insides into a raging storm, and he stared back at the paper. Perhaps it was innocent, and she'd heard about and identified with Brontë's deep portrayal of isolation. No, he knew he was being disingenuous; that the protagonist's falling passionately in love with an older teacher was as central to the plot as her struggle with depression, and Sansa's choice was the equivalent of a very short love letter.

Willas coughed loudly and excused himself from the class for a few moments, hiding in the teacher's restroom to sort out the extreme oscillation in his emotional state. He felt on the one hand validated that his feelings for her were reciprocated, but on the other deeply sick for allowing his dangerous attraction to get this far.

As soon as her class dismissed he called the front office and requested a substitute, claiming pain in his leg beyond what he could manage. He taped a very, very generic note to the door, apologizing for his absence, and retreated him home, tail tucked firmly between his legs.

* * *

Any distance he attempted to create didn't last long. A week after her book choice she emailed him to say she was accepted to her top choice university (coincidentally, or perhaps not, his alma mater), and he was effusive in his pride for her. She blushed as she shyly explained that she'd decided to major in English, and his pride grew in a way he was used to being uncomfortable with.

After Easter she explained one of her friend's obsession with astrology to him, leaning precariously close to him to help him look up his birth chart. "It's a bit silly, I think, but I think it also helps tell us things about ourselves that we might not be ready to admit. See, my Venus is in Cancer, which means the most important thing for me to feel in love is security." He could make her feel secure. "That's probably important for a lot of people, but it's something I really had to acknowledge after…after Joffrey, and this helps me do that!" Willas's Venus was in Scorpio, which apparently made him sensual and possessive and overly serious.

* * *

It was perhaps a testament to the depth of his feelings and their inherent wrongness that he began preparing her graduation gift a month and a half in advance. He had to get the inscription completely right, keep the perfect balance of acknowledging how large a part of each other's lives they'd become, without acknowledging the feelings that had arisen because of that, all the while staying true to the spirit of the momentous occasion.

Willas shook his head, rubbing the sleep from his eyes and chasing the last vestiges of his dream of her away. He scratched one line out of his leather notebook, then another, then the whole paragraph, and started again. "Sansa," he began, his pen slowly hugging every curve of her name, "Many congratulations are due. You're an wonderfully bright young woman, and I'm sure you know there are endless possibilities ahead of you, all befitting your brilliance." He paused, adjusting the position of the heating pad on his bad leg. "Rather selfishly, I'll miss your presence in my classroom," even barely awake, he had the sense not to stop at 'I'll miss you,' no matter how badly he wanted to, "and you should know that you're welcome to return to it at any time. Please take this relic of my own time standing in your shoes, and step forward confidently." There. A week of playing with it, and he'd finally gotten the words right, only moments after dreaming of her.

He threw the heating pad onto the table (it wasn't helping his leg anyway) and fetched his Anthology of Literature from his desk, as well as his nicest pen. Twice he'd checked to make sure the book was still the one required for the first year classes, and that his eight year old version was acceptable. Once that was assured, he leafed through, making sure there were no notes or scraps of his college life tucked between the pages. He returned to the kitchen, sitting and practicing writing her name in his leather notebook with the nicer pen.

When the inscription was finished, he debated for a moment on how to sign it. Even in the state they were in, he was always Professor to her, and his full name felt too formal. So he simply signed his first name, and left the open book on his kitchen table.

As he limped back to his bed, Willas allowed himself to hope that one day his dream would pick up where it left off.


End file.
